Then & Now | Why even wealthy merchants in Hong Kong were looked down on because of the social snobbery of colonial British
Those in government service or the armed forces looked down on the European merchant class as ‘boxwallahs’ who peddled goods for a living
Until recent years, peculiarly British forms of social snobbery persisted in post-colonial life. Among the most unpleasant varieties were those associated with how one earned a living in the pre-meritocratic age.
In this regard, caste distinctions were especially acute within the mercantile world.
The crucial difference between commerce and trade, social arbiters maintained, was that a man who worked in the former sat at a desk in an office and traded nails by the shipload while the latter stood in his shirtsleeves at a shop counter and sold the same product by the pound.
Commerce was acceptable – especially if it was profitable – while trade was always somehow a bit infra dig; those who started out in life that way were never quite allowed to forget it, however wealthy and influential they might become.
But for the convenience of categorisation, those who worked in commerce and trade were bracketed together across Asia by an overarching term unknown anywhere else: boxwallah. This once generic, now largely forgotten Anglo-Indian designation was applied to businessmen, general traders and merchants.